This is an argument I’ve been pitching in the Australian context for some 20 years now - we should have been world leaders in solar technology, to the extent that by now we should have massive solar farms across the North of Australia in order to export clean, green energy up to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and other near-neighbours. We could have created a whole new industry of both research and advanced manufacturing, and if we’d nationally sequester our resources correctly we could be doing every step of the way - dig out the minerals, refine them, manufacture them into panels, export those panels - all the while generating very low cost energy and exporting it for profit as well! Not to mention so many new jobs!
Even once you take away all of the obvious arguments for climate change action (environmental, ethical, prevention of future disasters etc.) there was always going to be a strong financial incentive in a capitalistic market to move to technology that has the lowest input cost to generate energy, which just so happens to be renewables. It just baffles me that so many politicians crucified themselves on the altar of coal when they could’ve been remembered for ushering in simultaneous economic benefit and environmental benefit, with a long term impact of lowered inflation through cheaper power bills, but that’s what the minerals lobby in this country has managed to achieve. What a disgrace.
Good to see a world leader using the economic arguments in addition to the other more obvious ones.
So were just supposed to celebrate milquetoast bullshit? Capitalism isn’t going to fix shit
How about you reward any action in the right direction because it ain’t fucking happening normally no matter how many grand ideas you hold.
If you’re going to wait to fix climate change, until after you’ve replaced capitalism first. You might as well work on taraforming Mars and sending billions of people on rockets instead.
please ignore sudden tarrifs on EVs, batteries and solar panels as we hope capitalism solves the crisis. We can throw them money and they’ll do it like when we did that to have isps expand internet access and infrastructure
Decarbonization is a worldwide multi-decade project. It’s not something that any one politician or country can do on its own.
Hundreds of billions towards highways is certainly an action on climate
Not every action has been in the right direction, but on balance, the bulk have been.
The bulk has been money to highways. Nothing else comes close
Yes, a lot of money is spent on things like repairing highways. “Just don’t maintain the bridge” isn’t a good move.
Its poison for any effort to curb climate change. The concrete production alone is a major source of greenhouse gases, and its being done to further prioritize the single largest source of emissions in the US, personal vehicles. I cant think of a more effective thing to spend money on if the goal is to accelerate climate change.
Which is why the federal government is trying to buy concrete made in different ways that don’t cause those emissions.
It’s not at full scale yet, and won’t be for some years. but it’s how you actually solve that kind of problem without making peoples’ lives worse.
This shit is like clean coal. Its not a thing, concrete production involves releasing the co2 from calcium carbonate, not even mentioning the heating and fuel requirements that go into that process. These highways are going to be built with conventional concrete.
The problem hasn’t been “you can’t do it” but “architects and engineers don’t have enough experience with it to trust it, so they don’t use it” — a federal government purchasing program can fix that.
But but but Biden bad!1!
Very
Said below an article about the good things Biden did. Yup.
They always say the same thing, some declaration of passing the greatest most stupendous climate legislation of all time. The climate legislation that sold millions of acres of federal land for oil and gas extraction.
Dudes pushed more progression than obama and done it with a hostile senate. Get your head out of your arse and try looking at reality.
The reality is that bill mandated the sale of a lot of federal land specifically for oil and gas extraction, and that US oil production continues to increase with no peak in sight.
There is it again: B b b b Biden bad!1!
You gotta try even harder to say it in a dumb sounding way for it to work
Nah it summarizes everything quite well. No matter what’s done, all you say is Biden bad.
